the ghosts beneath
by sinkingsidewalks
Summary: "It starts with an itch, in the back of his mind, a stove that he can't remember turning off, a phone call he hasn't responded to but from whom he doesn't know. The ghost of something." An exploration of Fitz's (potential) thoughts through 4x17: Identity and Change


It starts with an itch, in the back of his mind, a stove that he can't remember turning off, a phone call he hasn't responded to but from whom he doesn't know. The ghost of something. Shapeless, boundless, entirely undefinable, yet there nonetheless, only when he isn't looking for it.

It's bothersome to say the least. He knows his own mind. He stays up far past Ophelia, checking and double checking the calculations on Project Looking Glass. Nothing's out of place.

When she wakes the next morning, comes and finds him slumped over at his desk, he swears that he reads more into her expression than could possibly be there.

Then he sees her face, the subversive, the woman, and there's nothing there. Except _that_ , the emptiness of his gaze, is what feels unexpected, is what feels hollow. Like he's forgotten his own reflection.

She's beautiful, of course, even beneath the dirt and the grimace set across her expression, but to him she's nothing more.

Did he leave the pan on the stovetop this morning? Maybe he didn't switch off the coffee pot? Is he wearing pants beneath his trousers?

It feels like a string tied around his wrist, but what it's to remind him of he's got no idea. He rubs at the empty skin anyways and, instead of pondering his potential insanity, resolves to find the subversive and take her out. That will undoubtedly solve his uncertainty.

He ignores the thread of thought that tells him this feeling started long before Jemma Simmons.

Fitz watches the ocean from a port window in the lower level lab inside the jet. No one dares linger with him. He stares out across to where the horizon melts the edges of the sky and the water together, the ocean an endless, glittering blue beyond where their shadow encroaches.

They've just past Bermuda, there won't be anything to mar the view until they arrive at the island. From his perspective, it looks desolate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just below the surface, beneath the barrier of waves, exists a whole world, an entire ecosystem that they, as humans, can barely touch, such are the dangers of environment, the threat of hypoxia.

He finds his fingers gracing over the delicate skin of his inner wrist without cause. If he were to press down, around the tendons, onto the radial artery, he'd be able to feel the pulse of his heart through the skin. He doesn't. Instead, he shoves the fingers into the pocket of his trousers.

There's no reason he should be feeling this off.

Clacking heeled footsteps approach the glass door to the lab and he pieces his attention back together in the presence of his lover.

The exiled scientist doesn't faze him. He is just a desperate man, lost in his mind to the science, to _love_. The Doctor doesn't stoop to such levels.

Fitz listens to him prattle, beg really, and ignores the sour taste in his mouth when Radcliffe says he crossed the universe for the subversive, ignores that it doesn't sour the words being said, but rather his memories.

There's no time to think of where he's stolen Ophelia's words from.

Instead of questioning, he shoots the woman.

Jemma Simmons screams his name.

Just for a moment, it feels like he has a grasp on what it was that he forgot. Then it slips, off his tongue, from between his fingers, like trying to catch a cloud, dry ice over his palms.

He can't look away from her. He doesn't know why.

It's as if in a dream, where the features of someone's face are not their own, are unrecognizable, belonging to a complete stranger, yet that doesn't make them any less familiar.

Security drags him out before he can breathe again.

On the plane, in the air, Ophelia lays her hand across his forearm. Through the fabric of his jacket and shirt, onto his skin, something in the touch burns.

He shakes his head instead of shaking off her touch and tells her he has something in the labs to check on.

There, he finds himself no longer staring out into the sea. A phantom of pain somewhere in his chest, the feeling of uncertainty, that he wishes to carve out, with a blade, if only he could place it.

A breath shudders through his lungs as he tries to parse out why his skin no longer feels like his own. Like it's been stretched over the frame of another skeleton, then handed back to him, ill-fitted and worn out.

He tries to explain away the stumble of his heart when he saw her, the inexplicable pull towards this relative stranger, the worry that sunk through his heart when the gunfire started, worry that was not for himself, was not for Ophelia.

He can't.

There's nothing he can work out himself, no one that he would dare broach the subject with. Except.

He has questions. Skye – Daisy – the traitor – has answers.

xx

I thought I wasn't going to write anything about these episodes. I thought wrong.

Anyways, let me know what you think and if you want to come chat I'm always around on tumblr at sinkingsidewalks


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